Fern Schumer Chapman

“The living take a part of the dead with them, carrying them around in their minds, like a song that lingers after the music has been turned off.”

“Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.”

“The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.”

“Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die.”